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He wasn’t a religious person. He was, however, “a spiritual person”. His words.

It meant that he was snacking on the big buffet table of different faiths and beliefs. Some days he believed in reincarnation, other days in nothing, and on yet some other days, he believed in everything from astrology to God to magic and other dimensions. Those were the days he was at his happiest, although, it was difficult to see cause and effect there.

In short, the happier he was the more he believed in everything and everybody but effect could have also gone in the other direction.

And he was never happier than when he walked through town early in the morning in the summer after a long day and night in his favorite bar in the middle of the said town.

He couldn’t wait to tell her the joke. It was an old joke, for sure, and he didn’t know what had made him think of it just now, but it was a good one. He had even chuckled out loud while standing in line to pick up a package from the post office. (It was a book, if you must know. Which one? The latest Harry Potter book. Happy now?)

My great-grandmother had always told her daughter that when she died, she’d come back as a ghost, and she’d haunt their home.

“But in a good way,” she’d said, “like a house sitter.”

By the time I was born, my great-grandmother had already passed away but she had, by my grandmother’s account, found her way back into the house. Whenever my grandma couldn’t find her keys, she blamed her mother. When the windows were open when she got home from the store – her mother’s doing. When people were walking their dogs outside her house, and the barked, they could see something not any human couldn’t: her mother.

People often ask me how come I’m always so happy. Now, nobody’s always happy and I wouldn’t even dream of saying that I’m always happy, but it is true that I often seem to be smiling, even when I’m not. I can say, though, that there hasn’t been a day when I haven’t been smiling going to work, and then I just keep smiling all day long.

I think that helps. It’s hard to be unhappy when you’re smiling.

And it’s hard not to smile when you’re riding a rollercoaster all day long. Literally.

She woke up with a short gasp. A silent one, but a gasp nonetheless. She wondered how long she’d been holding her breath in reality. In the dream, she’d raced through long corridors until she had come to a dead end and then she had heard a door close behind her, and then the walls had started to close in on her, and she had screamed and then she had tried to push back with everything she got, before she had blown a bubble with her gum and hoped it would hold the walls, but the bubble had burst and the walls got closer and closer, and then there was … a circus and … she had flipped a bird at a guy watching her at the ceiling window and … just as the walls had touched her on both sides, she woke up.

She didn’t need to analyze the dream all too long to figure out two things about it. First, it was nonsensical like most of her dreams seemed to be. They didn’t feel that weird to her when she was having the dreams, but when she told them to him in the morning, he always laughed, and told her they didn’t make any sense.

And second, she knew what had made her brain produce the image of walls closing in.

“Hey,” he said, startling me. We had been sitting in my room silently for so long that I had forgotten that Mikey was there. I’m pretty sure he had been there, sitting in my room, reading comics and listening to music, while I had gone to the kitchen and made a sandwich (ham and cheese, my favorite).

Do you think you have to talk to somebody to really know them? To really understand them, I mean. Or do you think that you can know somebody just by watching them?

I remember reading about a study once. I’ve forgotten the details now, it’s been a while, and my memory’s not what it used to be although I seem to remember a lot of things from decades ago, from when I first moved here, for example.

The first time K and I became friends, I was 12 years old. He was thirteen, which made him the boss of me, because in that age, age is everything. I was also shorter, and a little skinnier, so even if I ever had decided to go against K’s ideas, he surely would have got me back in line, fast.

But there was never any need for that because we were the best of friends.

“Well-Known Local Orchestra Available for New Year’s Eve due to cancellation.Dial 5-1595 or 3-4454”– Reading Eagle, Dec 6, 1952

I wouldn’t say there was panic in the air, but the guys were a little agitated. And understandably so. We had been looking forward to the New Year’s Eve gig for weeks and we had added two new songs onto our set list so that we could play for over an hour.